Spider Versus Centipede

Friday, August 10, 2007

Huzzah! Huzzah! This has been a very worthwhile program and I would do it all again. I have learned many things. Like what a wiki is. Like what an RSS feed is. Bloglines. Technorati. Del.icio.us. I know what they are now. The most exciting thing I take away from these exercises is the overall concept and resultant manifestation of Web 2.0. The machine is us.Our lives will never be the same. And not for the last time.

I have been listening to books on tape and books on CD for years. I love them. They saved my life for the years that I had to drive a long way to work. I still love them. Downloadable audiobooks widen one's listening horizons. I looked at Overdrive and Project Gutenberg. I didn't realize that Project Gutenberg offered audiobooks. I downloaded William Blake's "Tiger" and Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark." I listened to them using Windows Media Player and saved them to my desktop. "TIGER, tiger burning bright / In the forests of the night,..." Great stuff!Overdrive is a little annoying because you have to install their software and then perform a security upgrade that acts like Orwell's "Big Brother" to your audiobooks. Well, sorry, that's all the time I have for now...off with my friends to hunt the snark...

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

While there are tons of podcasts out there, it took some time to locate one to subscribe to. I decided on the Genealogy Guys where, you guessed it, they discuss all things genealogical. Very useful for work in the Maryland Room. As far as libraries go, podcasts are another cool way to get content, information and instruction to patrons and staff.

Saturday, August 4, 2007

I had never spent any quality time on YouTube and thought it was mostly pet videos and people acting stupid. After doing some exploring, I come to find there are all kinds of really interesting and creative videos out there just waiting to be found. By searching "book repair," I located a number of clips demonstrating simple book repair techniques. I particularly liked the video (playing above) in which Molly shows us the contents of her book repair tool box. I think it could be very cool to be able to post short videos on our library's website -- like of the Harry Potter party or book reviews or blurbs about new databases.

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Pandora is a music Web 2.0 site. The folks at Pandora have created the Music Genome Project in which they have analyzed tons of different music and broken it down into its "genes" thereby enabling them to create an entire "radio station" based upon a song or artist that you like. It's fun, easy to use, and works well. You pick a song or artist and the site starts playing songs for you that are similar to your pick. You then have the option of saying "yes, I like" or "no, I don't like." The only slight criticism I have is that their analysis of songs can yield some odd choices in your "radio station." Doesn't really have a library application that I can see since we tend to discourage, if not negate, sound capabilities.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

This is great! Being able to word process and use other applications on the web is a terrific idea. This has real potential for our patrons as well. I tried both Zoho Writer and Google Docs. Both were very easy to use but neither would let me post the document I had created to my blog. I tried over and over with no luck -- kept getting the same error messages. Very frustrating!

Saturday, July 28, 2007

For some reason, unknown to me, the wiki would not let me link the title of my blog to my blog's URL when I was trying to add it to the Favorite Blogs page. It kept saying in the lower left corner: "error on page" or something like that. So I had to settle for listing the URL. (From the note at the top of the page, it looks like they had been having this problem earlier in the month but it was supposedly fixed??) Maybe it's me.